Darkest Hour

by Meg Cabot

  “Tell me about it,” I said, fingering my bruise. “They think it’s still 1850, and they’re afraid of the neighbors finding out they offed you. Well, it’s all going to blow up in their faces in a day or so. The truth is coming out, courtesy of the Carmel Pine Cone—”

  Jesse spun me around to face him. He looked madder than ever. “Susannah,” he said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I told the whole story to CeeCee,” I explained, unable to keep a note of self-congratulation from creeping into my voice. “She’s interning at the paper for the summer. She says they’re running the story—the real story, about what happened to you—on Sunday.”

  Seeing his expression growing, if anything, even darker, I added, “Jesse, I had to. Maria killed the guy at the historical society—the one she stole your picture from in order to do the exorcism. I’m pretty sure she killed his grandfather, too. Maria and that husband of hers have killed everybody who has ever tried to tell the truth about what really happened to you that night. But she’s not going to be able to do it anymore. That story is going to go out to thirty-five thousand people. More even, because they’ll post it on the paper’s website. Maria isn’t going to be able to kill everybody who reads it.”

  Jesse shook his head. “No, Susannah. She’ll just settle for killing you.”

  “Jesse,” I said. “She can’t kill me. She’s already tried. I’ve got news for you: I am really, really hard to kill.”

  “Maybe not,” Jesse said. He held something out in his hand. I looked down at it. To my surprise, I saw that it was the rope we’d been following.

  Only instead of the end disappearing down into the hole through which I’d climbed, it sat, frayed, in Jesse’s hand. As if it had been cut.

  Cut with a knife.

  chapter

  sixteen

  I stared down at the end of the rope in horror.

  It’s funny. You know what the first thing that popped into my head was?

  “But Father Dom said,” I cried, “that Maria and Felix were good Catholics. So what are they doing down in that church?”

  Jesse had a little more presence of mind than I did. He reached out and seized my wrist, twisting it so he could see the face of Father Dominic’s watch.

  “How much more time do you have?” he demanded. “How many more minutes?”

  I swallowed. “Eight,” I said. “But the whole reason Father Dom blessed my house was so they wouldn’t try to come in, and then look what they do. They come into a church—”

  Jesse looked around. “We’ll find the way out,” he said. “Don’t worry, Susannah. It has to be around here somewhere. We’ll find it.”

  But we wouldn’t. I knew that. There was no point, I knew, even in looking. What with the fog covering the ground so thickly, there was no chance we’d ever find the hole through which I’d climbed.

  No. Susannah Simon, who’d been so hard to kill, was effectively dead already.

  I started untying the rope from around my waist. If I was going to meet my maker, I at least wanted to look my best.

  “It must be here,” Jesse was saying as he waved at the fog, trying to part it in order to see beneath it. “Susannah, it must be.”

  I thought about Father Dominic. And Jack. Poor Jack. If that rope had been cut, it could only have been because something catastrophic had happened down in the church. Maria de Silva, that practicing Catholic Father D. had been so convinced would never dare launch an attack on consecrated ground, had not been as frightened of offending the Lord as Father Dominic had assumed she’d be. I hoped he and Jack were all right. Her problem was with me, not them.

  “Susannah.” Jesse was peering down at me. “Susannah, why aren’t you looking? You cannot give up, Susannah. We’ll find it. I know we’ll find it.”

  I just looked at him. I wasn’t even seeing him, really. I was thinking about my mother. How was Father Dominic going to explain it? I mean, if he wasn’t already dead himself. My mom was going to be really, really suspicious if my body was found in the basilica. I mean, I wouldn’t even go to church on Sunday. Why would I be there on a Friday night?

  “Susannah!” Jesse had reached out and seized me by both my shoulders. Now he gave me a shake with enough force to send my hair flying into my face. “Susannah, are you listening to me? We only have five more minutes. We’ve got to find a way out. Call him.”

  I blinked up at him, confusedly pushing my long dark hair from my eyes. That was one thing, anyway. I’d never have to worry about finding the perfect shade to cover my gray. I’d never turn gray now.

  “Call who?” I asked dazedly.

  “The gatekeeper,” Jesse said through gritted teeth. “You said he was your friend. Maybe he’ll show us the way.”

  I looked into Jesse’s eyes. I saw something in them I’d never seen before. I realized, in a rush, what that something was.

  Fear. Jesse was afraid.

  And suddenly I was afraid, too. Before I’d just been shocked. Now I was scared. Because if Jesse was afraid, well, that meant something really, really bad was about to happen. Because Jesse does not scare easily.

  “Call him,” Jesse said again.

  I tore my gaze from his and looked around. Everywhere—everywhere I looked—I saw only fog, night sky, and more fog. No gatekeeper. No hole back to the Junipero Serra Mission church. No hallway filled with doors. Nothing.

  And then, suddenly, there was something. A figure, striding toward us. I was filled with relief. The gatekeeper, at last. He would help me. I knew he would….

  Except that, as he came closer, I saw it wasn’t the gatekeeper at all. This guy didn’t have anything on his head except hair. Curly brown hair. Just like—

  “Paul?” I burst out incredulously.

  I couldn’t believe it. Paul. Paul Slater. Paul Slater was coming toward us. But how—

  “Suze,” he said conversationally as he strolled up. His hands were in the pockets of his chinos, and his Brooks Brothers shirt was untucked. He looked as if he had just breezed in from a long day on the golf course.

  Paul Slater. Paul Slater.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Are you …are you dead?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question,” Paul said. He looked at Jesse, who was still clutching my shoulders. “Who’s your friend? He is a friend, I assume.”

  “I—” I glanced from Jesse to Paul and then back again. “I came up here to get him,” I explained. “He’s my friend. My friend Jesse. Jack accidentally exorcised him, and—”

  “Ah,” Paul said, rolling back and forth on his heels. “Yes. I told you that you should have left well enough alone with Jack. He’ll never be one of us, you know.”

  I just stared at him. I could not figure out what was happening. Paul Slater, here? It didn’t make any sense. Not unless he was dead. “One of…what?”

  “One of us,” Paul repeated. “I told you, Suze. All this do-gooding, mediator nonsense. I can’t believe you fell for it.” He shook his head, chuckling a little. “I would have thought you were smarter than that. I mean, the old man, I can understand. He’s from a completely different world—a different generation. And Jack, of course, is…well, clearly unsuited for this sort of thing. But you, Suze. I’d have expected more from you.”

  Jesse let go of my shoulders but kept one hand firmly around one of my wrists…the wrist with Father Dominic’s watch on it. “This,” he said, “is not the gatekeeper, I take it.”

  “No,” I said. “This is Jack’s brother, Paul. Paul?” I looked at him. “How did you get here? Are you dead?”

  Paul rolled his eyes. “No. Please. And you didn’t need to go through all that rigmarole to get here, either. You can, like me, come and go from here when you please, Suze. You’ve just been spending so much time ‘helping’”—he made quotation marks in the air with his fingers—“lost souls like that one”—he nodded his head in Jesse’s direction—“you’ve never had a chance to concentrate on discovering your
real potential.”

  I stared at him. “You told me…you told me you don’t believe in ghosts.”

  He smiled like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. “I should have been more specific,” he said. “I don’t believe in letting them walk all over me, like you clearly seem to.” His gaze roved over Jesse contemptuously.

  I was still having trouble processing what I was seeing…and hearing.

  “But…but isn’t that what mediators are supposed to do?” I stammered. “Help lost souls?”

  Paul heaved a shudder, as if the fog swirling around us had suddenly grown colder. “Hardly,” he said. “Well, maybe the old man. And the boy. But not me. And certainly not you, Susannah. And if you’d bothered giving me the time of day, instead of being so caught up trying to rescue this one”—he sneered in Jesse’s direction—“I might have been able to show you precisely what you’re capable of. Which is so much more than you can begin to imagine.”

  A glance at Jesse told me that I had better cut this little conversation short if I didn’t want any bloodshed. I could see a muscle I’d never noticed before leaping in Jesse’s jaw.

  “Paul,” I said. “I want you to know that it really means a lot to me, the fact that you, apparently, have your finger on the pulse of the mystical world. But right now, if I don’t get back to earth, I’m going to wake up dead. Not to mention the fact that if I’m not mistaken, your little brother might be having a really hard time down there with a guy named Diego and a chick in a hoopskirt.”

  Paul nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Thanks to you and your refusal to acknowledge your true calling, Jack’s life is in danger, as is, incidentally, the priest’s.”

  Jesse made a sudden motion toward Paul, which I cut short by holding up a restraining hand.

  “How about giving us some help then, huh, Paul, if you know so much?” I asked. It was no joke, holding Jesse back. He seemed ready to tear the guy’s head off. “How do we get out of here?”

  Paul shrugged. “Oh, is that all you want to know?” he asked. “That’s easy. Just go into the light.”

  “Go into the—” I broke off, furious. “Paul!”

  He chuckled. “Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to know if you’d seen the movie.”

  But he wasn’t chuckling a bit a split second later when Jesse suddenly launched himself at him.

  I’m serious. It was way WWF. One minute Paul was standing there, smirking, and the next, Jesse’s fist was sinking into his tanned, handsome face.

  Well, I’d tried to stop him. Paul was, after all, probably my only way out of there. But I can’t say I really minded when I heard the sound of nasal cartilage tearing.

  Paul was pretty much a baby about the whole thing. He started cursing and saying stuff like, “You broke my nose! I can’t believe you broke my nose!”

  “I’ll break more than your nose,” Jesse declared, clutching Paul by his shirt collar and waving his blood-smeared fist in front of his eyes, “if you don’t tell us how to get out of here now.”

  How Paul might have responded to this interesting threat I never did find out. That’s because I heard a sweetly familiar voice call my name. I turned around, and there, running toward me through the mist, was Jack.

  Around his waist was a rope.

  “Suze,” he called. “Come quick! That mean lady ghost you warned me about, she cut your rope, and now she and that other one are beating up Father Dominic!” Then he stopped running, took in the sight of Jesse still clutching a bloody-faced Paul, and said, curiously, “Paul? What are you doing here?”

  A moment passed. A heartbeat, really—if I’d had one, which, of course, I didn’t. No one moved. No one breathed. No one blinked.

  Then Paul looked up at Jesse and said, “You’ll regret this. Do you understand? I’ll make you sorry.”

  Jesse just laughed, without the slightest trace of humor, and said, “You’re welcome to try.”

  Then he tossed Paul aside as if he were a used tissue, strode forward, seized my wrist, and dragged me toward Jack.

  “Take us to them,” he said to the little boy.

  And Jack, slipping his hand into mine, did so, without looking back at his brother. Not even once.

  Which told me, I realized, just about everything—except what I really wanted to know:

  Just who—or, more aptly, what—was Paul Slater?

  But I didn’t have time to stay and find out. Father Dominic’s watch gave me a minute to return to my body, or be placed in the difficult position of not having one…which was going to make starting the eleventh grade in the fall a real problem.

  Fortunately, the hole was not far from where we’d been standing. When we got to it and I looked down, I couldn’t see Father Dominic anywhere. I could hear the sounds of a struggle, though—breaking glass, heavy objects hitting the floor, wood splintering.

  And I could see my body, stretched out beneath me as if I were sleeping, and sleeping so deeply I wasn’t stirring at the sound of all that racket. Not a twitch.

  Somehow, it seemed a much longer way down than it had climbing up.

  I turned to look at Jack. “You should go first,” I said. “We’ll lower you with the rope—”

  But both he and Jesse shouted, “No!” at the same time.

  And the next thing I knew, I was falling. Really. Down and down I tumbled, and while I couldn’t see much as I fell, I could see what I was about to land on, and let me tell you, I did not relish crushing my own…

  But I didn’t. Just like in dreams I’ve had where I’ve been falling, I opened my eyes at the moment of impact, and found myself blinking up at Jesse’s and Jack’s faces, peering down at me over the rim of the hole Father Dom had created with his chanting.

  I was inside myself again. And I was in one piece. I could tell as I reached down to make sure my legs were still there. They were. Everything was functional. Even the bruise on my head hurt again.

  And when, a second later, a statue of the Virgin Mary—the one Adam had told me had wept blood—landed across my stomach, well, that really hurt, too.

  “There she is,” Maria de Silva cried. “Get her!”

  I have to tell you, I am getting really tired of people—particularly dead people—trying to kill me. Paul is right: I am a do-gooder. I do nothing but try to help people, and what do I get for my efforts? Virgin Mary statues in the midriff. It isn’t fair.

  To show just how unfair I thought it all was, I heaved the statue off me, scrambled to my feet, and grabbed Maria by the back of her skirt. Apparently, recalling her last incident with me, she decided to make a run for it. Too late, though.

  “You know, Maria,” I said conversationally as I reeled her in by her flounces, the way a fisherman reels in a really big trout. “Girls like you really irritate me. I mean, it’s not just that you get guys to do your dirty work for you, instead of doing it yourself. It’s this whole I’m-so-much-better-than-you-because-I’m-a-de-Silva thing that really bugs me. Because this is America.” I reached out and grabbed a fistful of her glossy black curls. “And in America, we’re all created equal, whether our last name is de Silva or Simon.”

  “Yes?” Maria cried, lashing out with her knife. She’d apparently gotten it back. “Well, do you want to know what irritates me about you? You think that just because you are a mediator, you are better than me.”

  I have to tell you, that one cracked me up.

  “Now that’s not true,” I said, ducking as she took a swipe at me with her blade. “I don’t think I’m better than you because I’m a mediator, Maria. I think I’m better than you because I do not go around agreeing to marry guys I’m not in love with.”

  In a flash, I had her arm pinned behind her waist again. The knife fell to the floor with a clatter. “And even if I did,” I went on, “I wouldn’t have them murdered just so I could marry somebody else. Because”—keeping a firm grip on her hair with my other hand, I steered her toward the altar rail—“I believe the key to a successful relations
hip is communication. If you had simply communicated with Jesse better, none of this would be happening now. I mean, that’s your real problem right there, Maria. Communication goes two ways. Somebody has to talk. And somebody has to listen.”

  Seeing what I was about to do, Maria shrieked, “Diego!”

  But it was too late. I had already rammed her face, hard, into the altar rail.

  “The thing is,” I explained as I pulled her head back from the rail to examine the extent of the damage, “you won’t listen, either, will you? I mean, I told you not to mess with me. And”—I leaned forward to whisper in her ear—“I think I specified that you not mess with my boyfriend, either. But did you listen? No…you…did…not.”

  I accompanied each of those last four words with a blow to Maria’s face. Cruel, I know, but let’s face it: She totally deserved it. The bitch had tried to kill me, not once, but twice.

  Not that I’m counting or anything.

  Here’s the thing about chicks who were brought up in the nineteenth century: They’re sneaky. I’ll give them that. They have the whole back-stabbing, attacking-people-while-they’re-asleep thing down pretty pat.

  But as far as actual hand-to-hand combat goes? Yeah, not so good at that. I broke her neck pretty easily just by stomping on it. In Prada slides, too!

  It was a shame her neck wouldn’t stay broken for long.

  But while I had her nicely subdued, I looked around to see if Jack had made it down okay….

  And the news was not good. Oh, Jack was fine. It was just that he was hunched over Father Dominic, who was far from it. He was lying in a crumpled heap to one side of the altar, looking way worse for wear. I climbed over the altar rail and went to him.

  “Oh, Suze,” Jack wailed. “I can’t wake him up! I think he’s—”

  But even as he was speaking, Father Dom, his bifocals askew on his face, let out a moan.

  “Father D.?” I lifted his head and set it down gently in my lap. “Father D., it’s me, Suze. Can you hear me?”

  Father D. just moaned some more. But his eyelids fluttered, which I knew was a good sign.